The Principles of Aesthetics | Page 9

its use involves. Our first
perceptions of things contain as much of feeling and attitude as of color
and shape and sound and odor. Pure science and mere industry are
abstractions from the original integrity of perception and expression;
mutilations of their wholeness forced upon the mind through the stress
of living. To be able to see things without feeling them, or to describe
them without being moved by their image, is a disciplined and
derivative accomplishment. Only as the result of training and of haste
do the forms and colors of objects, once the stimuli to a wondering and
lingering attention, become mere cues to their recognition and
employment, or mere incitements to a cold and disinterested analysis
and description. Knowledge may therefore enter into beauty when,

keeping its liberality, it participates in an emotional experience; and
every other type of expression may become aesthetic if, retaining its
native spontaneity, it can acquire anew its old power to move the heart.
To be an artist means to be, like the child, free and sensitive in
envisaging the world.
Under these conditions, nature as well as art may be beautiful. In
themselves, things are never beautiful. This is not apparent to common
sense because it fails to think and analyze. But beauty may belong to
our perceptions of things. For perception is itself a kind of expression,
a process of mind through which meanings are embodied in sensations.
Given are only sensations, but out of the mind come ideas through
which they are interpreted as objects. When, for example, I perceive
my friend, it may seem as if the man himself were a given object which
I passively receive; but, as a matter of fact, all that is given are certain
visual sensations; that these are my friend, is pure interpretation--I
construct the object in embodying this thought in the color and shape I
see. The elaboration of sensation in perception is usually so rapid that,
apart from reflection, I do not realize the mental activity involved. But
if it turns out that it was some other man that I saw, then I realize at
once that my perception was a work of mind, an expression of my own
thought. Of course, not all perceptions are beautiful. Only as felt to be
mysterious or tender or majestic is a landscape beautiful; and women
only as possessed of the charm we feel in their presence. That is,
perceptions are beautiful only when they embody feelings. The sea,
clouds and hills, men and women, as perceived, awaken reactions
which, instead of being attributed to the mind from which they proceed,
are experienced as belonging to the things evoking them, which
therefore come to embody them. And this process of emotional and
objectifying perception has clearly no other end than just perception
itself. We do not gaze upon a landscape or a pretty child for any other
purpose than to get the perceptual, emotional values that result. The
aesthetic perception of nature is, as Kant called it, disinterested; that is,
autonomous and free. The beauty of nature, therefore, is an illustration
of our definition.
On the same terms, life as remembered or observed or lived, may have

the quality of beauty. In reverie we turn our attention back over events
in our own lives that have had for us a rare emotional significance;
these events then come to embody the wonder, the interest, the charm
that excited us to recollect them. Here the activity of remembering is
not a mere habit set going by some train of accidental association; or
merely practical, arising for the sake of solving some present problem
by applying the lesson of the past to it; or finally, not unpleasantly
insistent, like the images aroused by worry and sorrow, but
spontaneous and self-rewarding, hence beautiful. There are also events
in the lives of other people, and people themselves, whose lives read
like a story, which, by absorbing our pity or joy or awe, claim from us a
like fascinated regard. And there are actions we ourselves perform,
magnificent or humble, like sweeping a room, which, if we put
ourselves into them and enjoy them, have an equal charm. And they too
have the quality of beauty.
Despite the community between beautiful nature and art, the
differences are striking. Suppose, in order fix our ideas, we compare
one of Monet's pictures of a lily pond with the aesthetic appreciation of
the real pond. The pond is undoubtedly beautiful every time it is seen;
with its round outline, its sunlit, flower-covered surface, its background
of foliage, it is perhaps the source and expression of an unfailing
gladness and repose. Now the painting has very much the same value,
but with these essential differences. First, the painting is something
deliberately constructed and composed, the